There is a common – and commonly reported – assumption that the Trump administration will be heavy with incredibly rich businessmen.
Is it true?
With the start of the Trump administration just a couple of days away, Fortune magazine – one of the highest-profile business pubs in the country, and presumably a bunch who knows their business people – did a quick assessment. Fortune highlighted some calculatins by Republican pollster Bruce Mehlman.
In an analysis meant to provide context for what is about to happen, Mehlman counted heads and resumes and came to one obvious and expectable conclusion: This is gonna be different than what came before.
But, Mehlman says, the changes are not incremental. He says he is "bracing for an earthquake," Fortune says.
Here’s what Mehlman and Fortune found about the incoming Trump team:
— it has “vastly more CEO experience” that any of the five previous administrations (that would include Republicans George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
— it has far less experience in government than those five other administrations.
Just half of Trump’s cabinet nominees have served in government at all. Among those previous administrations, more than four in five initial members of the cabinets had been in government at some point.
— Thirty percent of Trump’s picks have actually led companies, nearly twice the share in George W. Bush’s first cabinet.
President Obama, it will not surprise you, had a cabinet with no CEOs. On the other hand, about one-quarter of Obama’s choices had PhD degrees. Trump has none.
But then, Trump emphasized many things, but academia was not one of them, while Obama is a former university professor.
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